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Five scientists and engineers — Graeme Clark, Erwin Hochmair, Ingeborg Hochmair, Michael Merzenich, and Blake Wilson — have been jointly awarded the 2026 for developing the modern cochlear implant, the first medical device to interface with the nervous system to provide a sense of hearing. More than a million deaf or nearly deaf people worldwide use cochlear implants to access sound and spoken language. The technology converts sounds into electrical signals delivered directly to the auditory nerve.

The $400,000 prize, administered by the ӳ����ý and shared among the five recipients, recognizes their complementary contributions to the development of safe implants that deliver electrical stimulation to the auditory nerve and the processing strategies that translate those signals into intelligible sound. These breakthroughs turned the cochlear implant from an experimental curiosity into a viable clinical option for many individuals.

“It’s my honor to recognize and acknowledge these five brilliant prizewinners whose work on a global level reflects their skills in science and engineering as they transformed awareness of sound and hearing for millions of people with the cochlear implant,” said Richard Merkin, MD, Founder and CEO of Heritage Provider Network. “Their achievement is stunning and represents the best of my intentions for the Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology at the ӳ����ý.” 

The Merkin Prize recognizes novel technologies that have had demonstrable real-world impact on human health. A selection committee, composed of nine scientific leaders from the US and Europe, evaluated nominations before choosing the cochlear implant team to receive this year’s honors. The winners will be honored in a prize ceremony in September.

“What makes this work especially remarkable is that it required not one breakthrough but several, achieved by different people working across different disciplines and different countries over many decades,” said Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and chair of the Merkin Prize selection committee. “The Merkin Prize gives us an opportunity to recognize several of the individuals whose contributions were essential to that success.”

Against all odds

Hearing occurs when sound waves travel through the ear and cause thousands of tiny hair cells in the cochlea to vibrate. These cells then activate tens of thousands of auditory nerve fibers to signal the brain. The most common cause of severe or complete hearing loss is damage to or absence of these hair cells. Once gone, they don’t regenerate, and no amount of amplification — such as traditional hearing aids — can compensate.

The five Merkin Prize laureates, however, envisioned an electrical device that could bypass the hair cells and directly stimulate the auditory nerve to produce the sense of sound. In separate, complementary efforts, they worked over several decades starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s from different corners of the globe to make their vision a reality.

Beginning in 1975, Ingeborg Hochmair and Erwin Hochmair, then at the Vienna Technical University, collaborated to develop the first microelectronics multi-channel cochlear implant. It had two key components: a small receiver implanted under the skin behind the ear and a flexible strand of electrodes that could be threaded into the cochlea to stimulate the auditory nerve at multiple points. On December 16, 1977, that device was implanted for the first time into a deaf patient in Vienna. The Hochmairs went on to found the company MED-EL, which has continued to advance cochlear implant technology. MED-EL is now one of the world’s largest manufacturers of hearing implants.

In Australia, Graeme Clark, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon whose father was deaf, completed his PhD work in 1969 and concluded that multi-channel electrical stimulation was needed to provide speech understanding. At the University of Melbourne, he led animal behavior and biological safety studies and engineering research to develop a subcutaneous receiver-stimulator unit. He inserted this in his first patient on August 1, 1978, and through that work, his team discovered a speech code that enabled this individual to understand some aspects of spoken communication without lipreading. This insight led to the creation of the first multi-channel implant approved by the FDA in 1985 and the company Cochlear, where Clark continued his work on cochlear implants, including speech processing systems, funded in part by the US National Institutes of Health.

Starting in the early 1970s, Michael Merzenich’s interdisciplinary team at the University of California, San Francisco worked to establish the neurophysiological basis for cochlear implants, helping to determine how best to connect the implants to the brain. In 1974, he convened a public meeting with over 50 speech and hearing experts and key government officials in the US to create a plan to accelerate the development of multi-channel implants. He continued to lead fundamental research on electrode array design and implant safety, and later conducted one of the first clinical trials of multichannel cochlear implants. This work eventually led to the commercialization of implants in the late 1980s by Advanced Bionics — a company that continues to produce the devices today.

By the mid-1980s, multielectrode cochlear implants were in clinical use. But their performance was uneven: Some users could understand some speech, but many could not. The problem was in the signal-processing strategies used to convert sound into meaningful patterns of electrical stimulation.

Blake Wilson developed innovations to help solve this issue. In 1989, Wilson and his team, working at Duke University Medical Center and what is now RTI International in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, developed a new signal processing strategy called continuous interleaved sampling, or CIS, that combined new and prior elements and enabled higher levels of speech understanding for more than 80 percent of cochlear implant users. This advance helped move the cochlear implant from an experimental treatment into an option for mainstream clinical practice.

From the lab to millions of lives

The cochlear implant’s clinical impact has been immense and continues to grow. More than a million people have received cochlear implants, which broaden their communication choices in a hearing-centric world. Meanwhile, studies of cochlear implants have transformed scientific knowledge of the human brain, including expanded understanding of how the brain adapts to sound and language input.

The cochlear implant’s influence has also reached well beyond audiology. By demonstrating that stimulating just a few dozen electrode sites could provide a sense of hearing, it has helped pave the way for emerging neural prostheses for vision and motor function.

“This whole story is a beautiful convergence of fields,” said Merkin Prize selection committee member Emery Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT. “You had neurophysiology and basic neuroscience to figure out how this organ works, a layer of engineering and technology development to stimulate it, and then behavioral science to confirm that patients were actually perceiving what was being delivered. It’s a true example of how basic, fundamental science can act as the backbone on which to create life-changing technologies.”